Color Splash Effect in Photoshop CS6

Skill level

Intermediate

This tutorial will cover a topic that I get asked about quite a bit, especially with mobile applications like Color Splash, that allow you to isolate a specific color in your image. Singling out a specific color in your image.

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I’m finally back from vacation, armed with thousands of photos that I really don’t know what to do with. So over the next few weeks, as I’m sorting through the photos I took in London and Paris, I’ll be releasing tutorials and providing you with the images so you can follow along. In today’s image, we’re going to attempt to single out the red phone box, leaving everything else black and white. If you want to download this image, click on the image below.

First, we need to single out the red in the phone box. There are a few ways that we can go about doing so, but for the sake of this tutorial, we’re going to use one of my favorite selection methods, ColorRange, which can be found under the Select menu.

This feature works by allowing you to select specific colors of your image, either by choosing a basic color from the dropdown, or by sampling your color of choice. In most cases, however, choosing a color from the dropdown might not be your best bet, as it’s super specific. If you select Reds, looking at the preview below, you’ll notice that the phone box isn’t fully white, which means that not all of the reds have been selected.

Further, changing the SelectionPreview at the bottom to BlackMatte shows us that the selection is somewhat faded.

Let’s try out the sampling method. This allows up to sample multiple shades of the base color that we want to select. Clicking on the phone box will sample a range of reds, defined by our Fuzziness slider. A higher value will include more similar tones, while a lower value will restrict the sampling to the specific red that you selected.

Now if there are reds that have not been selected, holding down your Shift key and clicking on the additional tones will include them in the sample.

As you select a larger range of tones, you might start to see areas outside the phone box being selected. There are two things you can do to help alleviate this. First, like we covered a moment ago, the Fuzziness slider can help increase or decrease the amount of similar tones that are being included in the selection.

You also have the Localized Color Clusters option, and the Range Slider. This can help focus your selection around the area that you have been sampling. A lower Range value will tighten up the selection around your subject.

Even after you have adjusted these sliders, you may want to go back and Shift+click on the areas that may have been removed. Your result won’t be 100% perfect, but we’ll deal with that in a moment.

Once you’re happy with the sampling, because we want to change everything except the phone box, go ahead and turn on the Invert option, and press OK. This will give us a selection of everything else in our photo.

From here, if you wanted to turn everything else Black and White, your best bet would be to add an AdjustmentLayer to keep our edit non-destructive.

This also gives us the ability to tweak the effect if needed. For example, the sign in the background got included in our selection. Because the Adjustment Layer includes a LayerMask, we can grab a whitebrush, and paint overtop of the sign to remove it’s red tones. The opposite works as well. If there are areas of the phone box which were not included, a blackbrush will bring back the reds which got lost in the process.

And there you have it. A simple way of singling out a color in Photoshop!

Kumar Manikam

So here on wards it gonna be CS6 tut no more CS5 is it ???

IceflowStudios

Naturally, I need to keep my training fresh. Most, if not all of what was in today’s tutorial works in Photoshop CS5. That will be the case with most upcoming training. Plus, the CS6 beta is available for free until it ships.

Paavo Balleriina Pohjolainen

Thanks

Aaron Bartosik

Thanks, this tutorial explained color selection better than i have seen in the past. With the explanation of range and selection preview, then using a B&W adjustment layer with the mask was a tremendous help!

Azmat Hasin

cool

Mohmmed Alamudi

Great thanks

asharat

Thanks , it is better way to select colour

E Jacob Cornelius

Excellent tutorial style and content. Thanks.

Bbelzner

Made it look really easy.

Steve Litalien

i would like to request a tutorial on brushed metal and how to make it look like brass, bronze and other metals besides the standard aluminum one that is on the net… its very limited and looks terrible large… (i.e. youtube brushed alum effects.)

Qassim Abbasi

bro u make awesome things its good to watch it and get inspired…
Keep doing good work bro.

Black Id

how about cs5?

Mäcces McFly

In his opinion CS5 is history.

IceflowStudios

This works the same in CS5.

http://www.product-shot.co.uk/ productshotuk

Just good ;your creative look so nice and hope we will get more .

DiegoNasra

brilliant

http://tonyescobar.org/ Tony Escobar

This is great. I’ve been looking for a simple tutorial on this and you nailed it. Thanks so much.

ReyXerxesAlejandroDizon

Thanks for the tutorial, wew, now I can do color Isolation in a breeze…

Simplyton

Fantastic tutorial – simple and straightforward.
Thanks also for providing the original image – often so difficult to learn to recreate effects on entirely different image.
Now that i’ve mastered the telephone box no image stands a chance
Thanks again

Adam

w0W AmAZE!!111!!!!1!1111

Phillip

Sweet Tutorial. It’s been ages since I’ve played in Photoshop. Thanks for helping not feel so out of touch.